The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by
Nicholas Tomalin
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
What an excellent unravelling of an ocean mystery. A yachtsmen in a global race decides to hoax his success and the very success of that could contribute to the death of the rightful winner and catapulte the hoaxer to an uncomfortable first where his log books would be examined too closely. This all in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first round the world yacht race. Crowhurst's own log books reveal his trickery and philosophies and rantings that apparently led to his suicide after which is custom, experimental yacht was found ghosting the Atlantica as unmanned as his "computer" was incomplete.
On 14 June 1968 Robin Knox-Johnston left Falmouth in his 32-foot (9.8-metre) boat Suhaili, one of the smallest boats to enter the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. Despite losing his self-steering gear off Australia, he rounded Cape Horn on 17 January 1969, 20 days before his closest competitor the mercurial Bernard Moitessier. Moitessier had sailed from Plymouth more than two months after Knox-Johnson, but he subsequently abandoned the race and instead sailed on to Tahiti. (In the book, it just says he started sailing around the world again in order to further dearly rejoining a modern world he despised. On on 18 March, Moitessier fired a slingshot message in a can onto a ship near the shore of Cape Town, announcing his new plans to a stunned world: "My intention is to continue the voyage, still nonstop, toward the Pacific Islands, where there is plenty of sun and more peace than in Europe. Please do not think I am trying to break a record. 'Record' is a very stupid word at sea. I am continuing nonstop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul.") The other seven competitors dropped out at various stages, leaving Knox-Johnston to win the race and become officially the first man to circumnavigate the globe non-stop and single-handed on 22 April 1969, the day he returned to Falmouth. Knox-Johnston donated his prize money for fastest competitor to the family of Donald Crowhurst.
Crowhurst's scheme left Tetley and Crowhurst apparently fighting for the £5,000 prize for fastest time. However, Tetley knew that he was pushing his boat too hard. On 20 May he ran into a storm near the Azores and began to worry about the boat's severely weakened state. Hoping that the storm would soon blow over, he lowered all sail and went to sleep with the boat lying ahull. In the early hours of the next day he was awoken by the sounds of tearing wood. Fearing that the bow of the port hull might have broken off, he went on deck to cut it loose, only to discover that in breaking away it had made a large hole in the main hull, from which Victress was now taking on water too rapidly to stop. He sent a Mayday, and luckily got an almost immediate reply. He abandoned ship just before Victress (upon whose design Crowhurst designed his own trimaran.) finally sank and was rescued from his liferaft that evening, having come to within 1,100 nautical miles of finishing what would have been the most significant voyage ever made in a multi-hulled boat. He may have just won if not for Crowhurst.
The tale of Crowhurst makes compelling reading and a book length treatment including Tetley, Knox-Johnston and Moitessier would be great, too, I think. Appendices cover much nautical tech.
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